The emergence of the cloud for computing applications has increased the demand for off-site installations, known as data centers, that store data and run applications accessed by remotely connected computer device users. A typical data center has physical chassis structures with attendant power and communication connections. Each rack may hold multiple network devices such as servers for computing, storage, or controls, as well as appropriate network and management switches. Each server in a rack may require access to a remote storage device for storing data when the data handled by the server exceeds the capability of the internal storage device of the server. Although remote storage devices may be set up in a coordinated array in a rack, they are more often simply a set of storage disks that require separate access for each of the other computing nodes in the rack.
Traditional computer systems including those that are set up in data centers have had several local disks. The disadvantage of such a system of local disks is that it lacks the agility of moving the local disk from an original system (e.g., a group of servers) to a new system (e.g., a new group of servers). A storage area network (SAN) architecture is a structure that supports remote storage of data for computer systems. A SAN architecture is a dedicated network that interconnects and presents shared pools of storage devices to multiple servers. Such an architecture can solve the problem of reallocating local disks to new systems, since a disk image can be dynamic in connecting to a different system through the SAN.
Traditional SAN storage architecture requires an additional storage service device to be installed into a dedicated storage system to supervise a network for all of the physical storage devices in the storage system. For example, a series of storage based servers that primarily include hard disk drives may be grouped to create a dedicated storage system. Such a storage system currently requires a storage service device to allow external computing servers to access the storage devices via a network managed by the storage service device. It is costly to provide the storage service device as well as integrate the storage system with other computing systems.
Thus, there is a need for a smart storage rack structure to integrate all local disks in one structure for access by computing nodes in the rack structure and thereby eliminate the requirement of a separate storage service device. There is a further need for a mechanism to emulate all local drives in a rack based remote storage system. There is a need for a system that allows all local disks of a computer system to be integrated in the same rack. There is also a need for remote security for ports connecting computing nodes to the storage devices of a storage system.